Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Next week I’ll be back, hard at work, but my husband and I are still on Part 35 of our Never-Ending Honeymoon for a few more days.

I leave for you two poems.  I wrote the first poem about the red Chinese wedding clothes I wore for our nuptials. The second poem is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, which may be the greatest poem about True Love ever written.

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Red Silk

by Nona Blyth Cloud

 – for all the creators of beauty
whose names we will never know

You hang
in the hall closet of my childhood,
. . . talisman of awe and mystery,
Journey to China made only in dreams . . .
Because of you
. . . the other side of the world is real,
and maps
. . . are pictures of places people live.

How many tiny women
. . .threaded silk,
. . . . . . sewed tiny stitches,
made you beautiful
. . . . . . with flowers, birds, symbols?
How many days
. . . . . . working
. . . until you and the night and their fingers
. . . . . . became one darkness?
Were they old
. . . . . . with blurring vision,
. . . or needle-eyed apprentices?
How many lifetimes
. . . embroidered
. . . . . . into births, deaths, marriages?

Flower centers so intricate
. . . each stitch
. . . . . . a risk of blindness –
Our century
. . . . . . forbids it –
No more blind women
. . . no bound, crippled feet.

We have gained so much . . .
. . . . . . What have we lost?
. . . Too soon,
. . . . . . no red silk sails from China
. . . untouched by machine . . .

Flowers for beauty
. . . Phoenix for long life, good fortune
from five thousand years of women’s hands:
. . . Ancient witnesses to our altered ritual

The garments of my wedding day,
. . . borrowed from another time
. . . . . . and half a world away.

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